“That would be amazingly kind of you, Ove,” Rune’s wife says at once, brightening.
Ove sticks his hands in his pockets. Kicks at the loose plastic by the threshold.
“Can’t your man sort out that kind of thing in his own house?”
Rune’s wife shakes her head mournfully.
“No, Rune has been really ill lately, you see. They say it’s Alzheimer’s. He’s in a wheelchair as well. It’s been a bit uphill. . . .”
Ove nods with faint recognition. As if he has been reminded of something his wife told him a thousand times, although he still managed to forget it all the time.
“Yeah, yeah,” he says impatiently.
“You can go and breathe their radiators, can’t you, Ove!” says Parvaneh.
Ove glances at her as if considering a firm retort, but instead he just looks down at the ground.
“Or is that too much to ask?” she continues, drilling him with her gaze and crossing her arms firmly across her stomach.
Ove shakes his head.
“You don’t breathe radiators, you bleed them . . . Jesus.”
He looks up and gives them the once-over.
“Have you never bled a radiator before, or what?”
“No,” says Parvaneh, unmoved.
Rune’s wife looks at the Lanky One a little anxiously.
“I haven’t got a clue what they’re talking about,” he says calmly to her.
Rune’s wife nods resignedly. Looks at Ove again.
“It would be really nice of you, Ove, if it isn’t too much of a bother. . . .”
Ove just stands there staring down at the threshold.
“Maybe this could have been thought about before you organized a coup d’état in the Residents’ Association,” he says quietly, his words punctuated by a series of discreet coughs.
“Before she what?” says Parvaneh.
Rune’s wife clears her throat.
“But, dear Ove, there was never a coup d’état. . . .”
“Was so,” says Ove grumpily.
Rune’s wife looks at Parvaneh with an embarrassed little smile. “Well, you see, Rune and Ove here haven’t always gotten along so very well. Before Rune got ill he was the head of the Residents’ Association. And before that Ove was the head. And when Rune was voted in there was something of a wrangle between Ove and Rune, you could say.”
Ove looks up and points a corrective index finger at her.
“A coup d’état! That’s what it was!”
Rune’s wife nods at Parvaneh.
“Well, yes, well, before the meeting Rune counted votes about his suggestion that we should change the heating system for the houses and Ove thou—”
“And what the hell does Rune know about heating systems? Eh?” Ove exclaims heatedly, but immediately gets a look from Parvaneh which makes him reconsider and come to the conclusion that there’s no need to complete his line of thought.
Rune’s wife nods.
“Maybe you’re right, Ove. But anyway, he’s very sick now . . . so it doesn’t really matter anymore.” Her bottom lip trembles slightly. Then she regains her composure, straightens her neck with dignity, and clears her throat.
“The authorities have said they’ll take him from me and put him in a home,” she manages to say.
Ove puts his hands in his pockets again and determinedly backs away, across his threshold. He’s heard enough of this.
In the meantime the Lanky One seems to have decided it’s time to change the subject and lighten up the atmosphere. He points at the floor in Ove’s hall.
“What’s that?”
Ove turns to look at the bit of floor exposed by the loose plastic sheet.
“It looks as if you’ve got, sort of . . . tire marks on the floor. Do you cycle indoors, or what?” says the Lanky One.
Parvaneh keeps her observant eyes on Ove as he backs away another step so he can impede the Lanky One’s view.
“It’s nothing.”
“But I can see it’s—” the Lanky One begins confusedly.
“It was Ove’s wife, Sonja, she was—” Rune’s wife interrupts him in a friendly manner, but she only has time to get to the name “Sonja” when Ove, in turn, interrupts her and spins around with unbridled fury in his eyes.
“That’ll do! Now you SHUT UP!”
All four of them fall silent, equally shocked. Ove’s hands tremble as he steps back into his hall and slams the door.
He hears Parvaneh’s soft voice out there asking Rune’s wife what all that was about. Then he hears Rune’s wife fumbling nervously for words, and then exclaiming: “Oh, you know, I’d better go home. That thing about Ove’s wife . . . oh, forget it. Old bats like me, we talk too much, you know. . . .”
Ove hears her strained laugh and then her little dragging footsteps disappearing as quickly as they can around the corner of his shed. A moment later the Pregnant One and the Lanky One also leave.
And all that’s left is the silence of Ove’s hall.
He sinks down on the stool, breathing heavily. His hands are still shaking as if he were standing waist-deep in ice-cold water. His chest thumps. It happens more and more these days. He has to sort of struggle for a mouthful of air, like a fish in an overturned bowl. His company doctor said it was chronic, and that he mustn’t work himself up. Easy for him to say.
“Good to go home and have a rest now,” said his bosses at work. “Now your heart is playing up and all.” They called it “early retirement” but they might as well have said what it was: “liquidation.” A third of a century in the same job and that’s what they reduced him to.
Ove is not sure how long he stays there on the stool, sitting with the drill in his hand and his heart beating so hard that he feels the pulse inside his head. There’s a photo on the wall beside the front door, of Ove and Sonja. It’s almost forty years old. That time they were in Spain on a bus tour. She’s suntanned, wearing a red dress, and looking so happy. Ove is standing next to her, holding her hand. He sits there for what must be an hour, just staring at that photo. Of all the imaginable things he most misses about her, the thing he really wishes he could do again is hold her hand in his. She had a way of folding her index finger into his palm, hiding it inside. And he always felt that nothing in the world was impossible when she did that. Of all the things he could miss, that’s what he misses most.
Slowly he stands up. Goes into the living room. Up the steps of the stool. And then once and for all he drills the hole and puts in the hook.
Then gets off the stool and studies his work.
He goes into the hall and puts on his suit jacket. Feels in his pocket for the envelope. He’s turned out all the lights. Washed his coffee mug. Put up a hook in his living room. He’s done.
He takes down the rope from the clothes-dryer in the hall. Gently, with the back of his hand, he caresses her coats one last time. Then he goes into the living room, ties a noose in the rope, threads it through the hook, climbs up on the stool, and puts his head in the noose.
Kicks the stool away.
Closes his eyes and feels the noose closing around his throat like the jaws of a large wild animal.
8
A MAN WHO WAS OVE AND A PAIR OF HIS FATHER’S OLD FOOTPRINTS
She believed in destiny. That all the roads you walk in life, in one way or another, “lead to what has been predetermined for you.” Ove, of course, just started muttering under his breath and got very busy fiddling about with a screw or something whenever she started going on like this. But he never disagreed with her. Maybe to her destiny was “something”; that was none of his business. But to him, destiny was “someone.”
It’s a strange thing, becoming an orphan at sixteen. To lose your family long before you’ve had time to create your own to replace it. It’s a very specific sort of loneliness.
Ove, conscientious and dutiful, completed his two-week stint on the railways. And to his own surprise he found that he liked it. There was a certain liberation in doing a job. Grabbing hold of things with his own two hands and seeing the fruit of his efforts. Ove hadn’t ever disliked school, but he hadn’t quite seen the point of it either. He liked mathematics, and was two academic years ahead of his classmates. As for the other subjects, quite honestly he was not so concerned about them.